


The Road from Faverolles

by Miss M (missm)



Series: The Road from Faverolles [2]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Backstory, Family, Gen, Minor Character Death, Parents & Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-27
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-12-09 16:04:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/776098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missm/pseuds/Miss%20M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Who troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves from the young tree which is sawed off at the root?" (<i>Les Misérables</i>, Volume I/Book II/Ch. IV)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Road from Faverolles

**Author's Note:**

> A fix-it of sorts, at least that was my intention. I wrote it as an independent sequel to ["The Plight of Mother Jeanne"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/758790), though I think it can be read on its own.

On the early morning of the first day of the year 1796, a small company could be seen on the road leading southwest from Faverolles. They were seven in number, a woman and six children, clad in rough, patched clothes. The children all had stockings, though these were worn thin; the mother's feet were bare in her lumpy sabots.

The woman was in her thirties, of medium height and sturdy build. Heavy labour and numerous childbirths had not sapped her of her strength. Her lips were pursed in grim determination; on her back she carried a knapsack and in her arms a child no more than two years of age. 

Her name was Jeanne Valjean and she was leaving the village of her birth. Less than three weeks before, her younger brother had been caught stealing a loaf of bread. He had been taken away, put in jail -- she did not know where. As the word spread, the villagers had started turning away from her in the street. What work she had been able to get before dwindled; the good people wanted nothing to do with the sister of a criminal.

Her second youngest had been close to death at the time of the theft. With nothing more than bark bread to nourish him, he died three days later. Jeanne Valjean had him buried in a pauper's grave, as she had done with her husband two years before and with their two first-born years before that. She brought her remaining six children to make their farewells. They stood around her staring at the grave, small faces crunched in sorrow, crying as they had done when she had told them their Uncle Jean would not come back. 

Jeanne Valjean herself did not cry; indeed, she could not. In the throes of desperation, her very soul seemed to freeze, shaping itself into stern resolve, like a steely column keeping her on her feet. Her one thought was this: she must save her surviving six. 

The few sous she had been saving for a Christmas dinner went to pay part of the rent she owed. She sold what little furniture there was in the cottage to pay off the rest. Christmas was spent feasting on bark bread, leftovers she had begged at the house of the curé, and an unfortunate crow she had been able to catch in a snare. Some days later, as the bells of Saint Silvester faded away and two-faced Janus turned his merciless eyes on France's poor, she took her children with her and set out for Paris.

 

***

 

In her struggle to save the six, Jeanne Valjean was ruthless. They would walk for long stretches at the time, only stopping to eat once or twice a day. She rationed their food strictly, keeping the smallest part for herself and the largest for her eldest, Jeanne, who took turns carrying the knapsack.

The children grew wearier each day. Some of them wept silently as they trudged along, others complained aloud, asking to sit down and rest, if only for a moment. Their mother looked at the wayside, where snow lay deep, and shook her head, knowing such leniency could well kill a tired body, to which a moment might so easily turn into hours.

At night they stopped at farms, Jeanne Valjean humbly asking for permission to sleep in the barn. As almost everyone took pity on the widow and the fatherless children, the wish was normally granted, and it happened more than once that the farmers gave the travellers milk and bread. To the children these offerings, these simple acts of mercy, were like gifts from Heaven. To Jeanne Valjean they were like tiny threads anchoring her to hope and thereby life. 

On one such farm, the wife took them into the house and let them sleep in the kitchen. In the morning, as the children gobbled up the hot _gruau_ with feverish motions, the farmer's wife told Jeanne Valjean of her brother in Paris: he was a printer, she said, in the Rue de Sabot, a good man and an honest man. Surely if the widow went there and told him she had been sent by his sister, he would have work for her. He might also know where there were cheap lodgings to be found.

Jeanne Valjean did not know anything of Paris; the name of the street told her nothing. Yet as she thanked the woman, she repeated the name over and over in her mind, whispering it to herself as if to strengthen the tiny thread of hope until it became a chain.

 

***

 

Though her feet were sore and her body exhausted, Jeanne Valjean's heart swelled with triumph as they entered the great city of Paris a clear winter's day at noon. It was the first strong emotion she had experienced for weeks.

When they finally succeeded in making their way to Rue de Sabot, the printer's workshop was closed for the night. This did not discourage her in the slightest. They slept under a bridge beside the local beggars, huddled together to keep warm, and in the morning she went back to ask for work, her six children in tow.

The printer was, as his sister had said, a good man; however, he was not wealthy. He could not pay her much, he warned, and the hours were long. She accepted this stoically. He glanced at her children and shook his head. Then he gave her the address of a cheap boarding house in a nearby alley and paid her twenty sous in advance. She used half of the money to rent a small room in the aforementioned boarding house; and, in a fit of uncharacteristic extravagance, went to a boulangerie and bought fresh bread for all of them, herself included.

That night, watching her children sleep in a bed for the first time in weeks -- crammed together, it is true, in the only bed in the room, which had only room for them all because they were so skinny -- Jeanne Valjean bowed her head, closed her eyes and let out a trembling sigh.

She slept on a thin mattress next to the bed, and rose before dawn to begin her new work. She did not yet allow herself to feel grateful; their new existence was as fragile as a newborn child, wholly subject to the whims of Fate. But the chain of hope, tethering her to life, remained unbroken.

 

***

 

The moment when Jeanne Valjean brought home the first week's wages and the results thereof, was one of grandeur. No adoring crowds could have outshone the look on her children's faces as she produced that evening's supper: cabbage, onions -- and a whole chicken!

She did not become spendthrift, however. Every sou left after rent was paid and food was bought, she saved in a small box kept safely under a loose floorboard, allowing only for the necessities: candles, yarn to mend the children's clothes and her own, new garments when it could not be helped. She kept a strict control of every expense, knowing the children would be on their own, should anything happen to her.

There was a school in the same house where she worked, and she allowed her three eldest to go there, wanting little Jeanne to at least learn the letters before she inevitably would have to find paid work -- which would not be long, in any case. The youngest three were looked after by an old woman two floors down, whose pay was low enough to compensate for the fact that the children complained about the way she smelled. 

Jeanne Valjean worked every day save Sunday, bought and cooked food for her children, said little and smiled even less, as if afraid to challenge Fate by an improper show of hubris. But although she did not know it herself, her soul was slowly thawing.

On a Sunday in spring she took her three middle children out for a walk, having trusted the youngest to Jeanne's care. No longer fleeing certain death for an unknown future, they were at liberty to stroll along the unruly streets, looking with horrified or awed fascination at the various incarnations of human life, from beggars to upstanding citizens. The sun warmed them; life suddenly seemed real again. Without knowing why, Jeanne Valjean shuddered.

As they turned a corner towards the main road, they spotted a large throng before them, a chattering, excited mass of bodies crowding together. Jeanne Valjean stretched her neck, but could not see the cause of the commotion. Turning towards an elderly woman, she asked, "What's going on?"

"A chain gang," said the woman. "Convicts passing on their way to the galleys." She spat. "Murderers and thieves."

Jeanne Valjean stood still. Her children looked at her uncertainly, obviously tempted to draw nearer and see the spectacle for themselves. "Mother?" little Jacques asked.

"Go, if you must. I'll stay here." She did not know from where the frightful feeling had come, only that all of a sudden, her heart felt as if it were clenched by some giant, icy fist. "I don't want to see."

Shouts and exclamations rose from the crowd; amid them she could hear the sound of hooves. The icy layer around her heart tightened, pressed, made it hard to breathe -- and then, suddenly, it cracked; the walls fell; the pain rushed through her body with the force of an inexorable army. Her knees buckled; she stumbled towards a nearby stone and sat down on it heavily. 

The children did not join the crowd. They drew nearer, their eyes at her face, their lips trembling. She raised her head towards them and tried to speak, but could not. Her soul, no longer frozen, found another way to express itself. For the first time in months, tears were streaming from Jeanne Valjean's eyes.

The children looked afraid. She opened her arms, and they came to her, burying their faces against her breast and her lap. The crowd took no notice of them. As the chain gang passed, and as the people jeered and yelled, Jeanne Valjean held her children close, kissing their brows and their hair as they all wept together.


End file.
